Wisse van Engelen
Wisse van Engelen is an environmental geographer/anthropologist with an interest in conservation, animal disease, pastoralism and ecotourism in Southern Africa. His work draws on political ecology, science and technology studies (STS) and the environmental humanities, and combines historical and ethnographic research methods. He has a BSc and MSc in conservation science from Wageningen University, and a PhD in STS from the University of Twente. For his MSc thesis he examined the politics of conservation-tourism partnerships in South Africa, before joining the 'Rewilding the Anthropocene' project at the University of Cologne. As part of this project, he conducted his PhD research on the intersection of foot-and-mouth disease control and wildlife conservation in the Okavango Delta in Botswana.List of recent publications:
Van Engelen, W. & Turnhout, E. (Forthcoming). Rewilding through Herding? Constructing and Contesting the Compatibility between Conservation and Pastoralism in the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area. Conservation and Society.
Van Engelen, W., Calkins, S., Turnhout, E., Bollig, M., & Weber, A. (2026). Porous Fences and Elephant Agencies: Rethinking Infrastructure in the Okavango Delta. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 0(0), 25148486261477079.
Van Engelen, W., Alexiou, P., Bollmann, M., Brekl, J., Köhler, E., Lacan, L., . . . Bollig, M. (2026). Bovines, Buffers and Barriers: A Social Scientific Perspective on Rewilding in the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area. Conservation Science and Practice, e70384.
Van Engelen, W. (2026). Bordering Animals: Biosecurity in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. (PhD thesis). University of Twente, Enschede.
Van Engelen, W., Pauwelussen, A., & Turnhout, E. (2026). The Park Multiple: Practices of Coordination in a Conservation-Tourism Partnership in South Africa. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 51(4), 753-782.
Van Engelen, W., Weber, A., & Turnhout, E. (2025). Provincialising Foot-and-Mouth Disease: The Construction of the African Buffalo as Disease Reservoir in Botswana, 1961–1976. Global Environment, 0(0), 1-29.
Alexiou, P., Brekl, J., Köhler, E., & Van Engelen, W. (2024). Performing Multispecies Studies in Southern Africa: Historical Legacies, Marginalised Subjects, Reflexive Positionalities. Anthropology Southern Africa, 47(2), 254-267. doi:10.1080/23323256.2024.2314786
Van Dam, A., Van Engelen, W., Müller-Mahn, D., Agha, S., Junglen, S., Borgemeister, C., & Bollig, M. (2024). Complexities of Multispecies Coexistence: Animal Diseases and Diverging Modes of Ordering at the Wildlife–Livestock Interface in Southern Africa. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 7(1), 353-374.